Green Picked Seventh

It's media day in the Ivy League with the coaches conference call ton tap at 11 a.m. I'll have something on the blog at the conclusion of the call and coverage on Green Alert Premium tonight.

In advance of the call, the media poll was released ...

Ivy League Preseason Media Poll
(First place votes) points
1. Harvard (10) 128
2. Penn (6) 124
3. Brown 95
4. Yale (1) 83
5. Columbia 61
6. Princeton 55
7. Dartmouth 39
8. Cornell 27

Green Alert Take: OK, this surprises me on at least two counts. I very much expected Penn to be chosen first and given the overwhelming number of players returning – including the stat leaders – I expected Dartmouth to be picked in the middle of the pack. That first-place vote for Yale? It may actually be the biggest surprise of all.

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The Ivy League's Media Day Central page is available here. Not much new there except the 2010 Ivy League football e-guide which isn't a guide at all, but a series of links. (Hint: Don't click on the school names looking for anything original. The links just take you back to the school home page.)

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Former Dartmouth tight end Damon Jones '95 is the head coach of a start-up high school football program profiled in Florida's Naples News.

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The Pioneer League poll is out and future Dartmouth opponent Butler was chosen second in the far-flung, 10-team league. (Sports Network link) The poll:

1. Dayton (4 first-place votes), 76 points
2. Butler (2), 69
3. Jacksonville (4), 68
4. Drake, 54
5. San Diego, 52
6. Marist, 45
7. Davidson, 30
8. Campbell, 25
9. Morehead State, 22
10. Valparaiso, 9

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There's a point-counterpoint thing going on with regard to the Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl game, long a fixture at Dartmouth's Memorial Field but played again last Saturday at Windsor High School in Vermont. (To the uninitiated, high school football stadiums in Vermont will never be confused with those in Texas. Dartmouth rents its portable stands to the Shriners to increase capacity. The estimated attendance this year was in the vicinity of 5,000.)

A columnist in the Nashua Telegraph in southern New Hampshire writes:

Yes, good ol’ Windsor. Nice place for the Shrine Game to visit, but I certainly hope it doesn’t end up living there.

Please get back to Hanover as soon as possible.

The Telegraph column includes this:

“If I had driven here (ahead of time),” (New Hampshire coach Ken) Sciacca said, “I probably would have pulled my name out.”

He wasn’t kidding; he wasn’t saying it for dramatic effect. Sciacca has always been a straight shooter, and he was simply saying what was on his mind – and a lot of others’ minds, as well.

“This is not the Shrine Game,” he said. “For the Shriners themselves, this is not the Shrine Game. The town itself – it’s a nice little town, but it’s not the Shrine Game to me.”

And Sciacca was like others of the same opinion – it’s not Windsor’s fault. The town and school did a great job. A for effort.

“They did as good a job as they could here,” Sciacca said. “The kids in both states deserve better, really.”

Our local daily takes the other side of the argument, pointing out that Dartmouth's higher fees for using Memorial Field mean less money to the Children's Hospital in Springfield, Mass. From the column:

In a game played to raise cash for charity, money talks. And the Shriners will tell you that they made more money for their hospitals -- which, by the way, offer free orthopedic and burn care to children under 18 years or age -- last year in Windsor than they did the last time the game was played at Dartmouth.

End of story.

Vermont's Rutland Herald writes:

The game should be played in a first-class college venue. The players should experience the thrill of running out of the tunnel at Dartmouth College onto the beautiful turf field. They should have the thrill of playing in a stadium where such luminaries as Reggie Williams, Ed Marinaro, Marcellus Wiley, Jay Fiedler and others have strutted their stuff.

There seems to be some question of how badly Dartmouth wants this game and how much they are charging.

Green Alert Take: Count me among those who would like to see the game played at Dartmouth. I rather suspect that if all the particulars were laid out in front of Dartmouth President Jim Kim – a doctor, a former football player and football fan – a plan could be fashioned to make it happen. Like some others, I worry about the future of the game – and the charity – if it strays much longer from its traditional home.

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As expected, the announced move from BlitzMail to a Microsoft service is receiving some mixed reviews among Dartmouth students. From the Daily Dartmouth:

“When I came to Dartmouth on my recruiting trip, everyone was talking about (BlitzMail),” Naomi Stahl ’12 said. “I didn’t really get it until I actually came here, but for me it became a big part of my Dartmouth experience because here traditions are so important.”